Hello, my intended...

It's your ol' pal, the Angel of Death... MOST... EXALTED... once again to impart a little of my wisdom. Fine.

You know what? I've noticed that there's just too damn many chat programs... Really. There's even some totally unrelated to chat programs that wedge in chat-type features for no discernible reason! I trotted over to ZD-Net's Downloads Section, and saw that there were SIX HUNDRED and SEVENTY-SIX different Chat enabled programs... Are they KIDDING? There aren't even that many different LANGUAGES... And of course, no less than 40% of them use 'proprietary' formats... Which means if you make a friend through Yahoo, you can only talk to them through Yahoo Instant Messenger... Same for MSN, AOL, CUSeeMe and even ICQ - and that's not getting into the little podunk ones like Kali, Odyssey, and Patchat (I swear, these are really out there...) One of my favorites (since ol' Bobo's an Injun, ethnically speaking) was TribalVoice's PowWow, which was one of the frontline battlers against AOL's controlling the market of Chat (and, sadly, a recent casualty of same battle)... That sad story is here, in case you're interested...

Now, this all started WAAAAAY back in 1982 or so on what was the 'daddy' of AOL... It was called QuantumLink (QLink, for short) and basically allowed all those thousands of Commodore users to gab and share files in a colorful little world. You could really scream along at 1200 baud, there, but that was pretty much all the speed you needed when your whole OS is hardwired on a couple chips, but I digress... Yep, for $19.95 a month, you could tap into the entire world. It was like the local BBSs, only national... Wow. Eventually, the Commodore fell out of vogue, and Q-Link was dissolved into an upstart company called Compuserve, who slowly fazed it out... Yep, I was there.

In fact, some strangely 'innovative' paradigms were created in those days, such as pretending that any problems with the program were the customer's fault, and suggesting they 'get a new copy' to solve them. Needless to say, I wasn't on QLink very long... BBSs were friendlier, and run by 'one of us' as opposed to a 'heartless company', so they flourished... At one time, you could get a list of up to a HUNDRED separate places to hang out, talk shyte, and generally be whatever you liked, and if your favorite spot was busy (owning two lines was uncommon, and more than two downright unheard of) you could usually find someplace else to go. The Big Two in BBS programs were ImageBBS and C-Net BBS (no, not the CNet that's out there now - at least, I don't think it is), and they were so similar that they sued each other a few times, but that's another story...

The point was, things were pretty simple and straightforward. As long as you could connect, and the person felt like talking, you could chat on whatever system you had... Sure, there were some odd bits when we started letting 'Beamers' in (IBM PC Users) who spent much of their time saying how great they were and how scumbag we 'Commies' (Commodore Users) were, but it generally worked okay... Why? Because everyone had the same stuff...

Anyway, on BBS's, if you got into some trouble, you could select Option C from the menu for 'Chat with SysOp' and if the person that owned the board was home, he'd hear the bleeping and come talk you through your travail... This was done through the revolution of 'full duplex' transfer, and generally the people you'd talk to were pretty nice (sadly, female sysops were rarer than hen's teeth, so the possibility of a dating pool was damn slim, unless the guy had a cousin or something...) They even went so far as to connect to each other and share postings on their message boards, which was basically done by the sysop calling the BBS he was 'linked' to (usually long distance and out of his own pocket) and synchronizing the messages with the ones on the other side, and so on all across the country in a thing they dubbed 'FIDO' (Free Information Dynamic Organization, IIRC), and later FidoNet.

All of you people currently using newgroups - and the internet itself as we now know it - owe a debt of thanks to these selfless pioneers that got the ball rolling (no, not Al Gore). And, as more and more people got on, wading through it all got a bit much - especially when people 'discovered' you could use it to advertise all MANNER of things, from weightloss products to multi-level marketing to porno... Wheee... Well, the thing is, it got so big that - to be honest - it scared most of us oldtimers pretty near shitless. It was anarchy, bedlam, CHAOS - and OUR fault... We all played a part in starting up that Great Space Coaster, and for my contribution I'm sorry... Really.

That said, as time went on and Moore's Law kicked in, connections were getting faster and faster... Fine, in theory, since you could download what you wanted in far less time, but in reality... Well, humans are social creatures - it's their nature. Sure, you could get into some fine discussions with others over a variety of subjects through FIDOnews, but it wasn't the same... It wasn't REAL (still isn't, if you wanna be technical, but hey). So we had these souped up computers just FLYING along, and the thing that most people wanted could be done at 300 baud... In ASCII... Sure, we needed these giant things to run stuff like Doom, but online (where most of the money is), you could get by with a 386 - even then not really TAXING it's power... What to do? The industry was in a panic, as they realized that they'd have no way to sell more of their stuff if people were (horrors!) HAPPY with what they HAD. They had to do something, and QUICK...

Folks, if you think advertising doesn't work, you're a dope... Nothing lasts forever, true, and as these things started winding down (silicon tech wasn't the streamlined, efficient business then that it is today... Must... Not... Laugh...) and the computers people were perfectly happy with started to fail. So they trot over to the computer store to get a replacement, and the salesmen (already briefed on the situation) pretty much looked down their nose at 'the piece of junk' you've been 'limping along' with because you didn't know any better... To make matters worse, the evil corporations stopped MAKING the thing you were so stupidly happy with, so you COULDN'T buy a replacement if you WANTED to - 'unless you (snif) tried a flea-market'.

People may say that money fuels the economy, but it doesn't. Testosterone does. The computer industry adopted the business model of the automotive industry, and it's been humming along ever since. Don't believe me? Try to buy a 2001 Oldsmobile... Heh. For the slow class, GM retired the Oldsmobile line, despite it being the ONE car line from GM that didn't suck... But I digress...

Anyway, people started looking for some way to connect to each other, and the defacto standard of the time was IRC (Internet Relay Chat)... Lovely, but there was a problem... It was just as big, scary, and downright unmanageable as FIDO was... Because ANYONE could use ANYTHING to log into an IRC server, and they DID... Pure Anarchy. NOT family friendly... Just for grins, check out an IRC server's channel list... Lots, eh? Now imagine your kid or your sister stumbling around innocently online and seeing something like '#teenlovers', '#bigtitblackwomanfuckfest', or '#sellyourpanties'... Feel that sudden falling sensation?

So, along comes Sir Steve... He decides that if someone clamped down and imposed rules - and then ENFORCED them, they could probably make a bundle selling what 'normal, wholesome people' wanted without the fear of being harrassed by the riffraff, much as the QLink of old did... Yeah, you AOL people can take a minute to laugh drily at how well THAT panned out... Heh. BUT it did do SOMETHING... It showed the rest of the world that if you make something, and tightly control it, people will pay for the sense of security - however false it may be... Only Sir Bill had made that work, and Sir Steve figured he could do it too... Gotta love America, eh?

So, he basically sold 'family-friendly' communication through a proprietary format that ensured ONLY people on that service could access it, and they could only do so if they 'followed the rules'... As a bonus, one could get another kicked out if they didn't behave, which would force that person to either do without or buy back in and behave themselves this time... BTW, the format was codenamed 'Joshua', and it's pretty sloppy, but I digress... So, they had a place where 'normal' people could go and enjoy the online experience without being harrassed about how stupid they were (pause for another laugh from the AOL crowd)... Everybody wins...

However, America needs competition... It's what the whole system is based on!

What I -am- saying is that a little competition prevents the top dog from getting complacent - which forces them to improve, and the customer gets the benefit of a better product all around... It's when they'd rather not be bothered that -I- have issues with... When they do everything they can to PREVENT anyone else from making any innovation... That's not good for us, folks... Competition is good for US. If there's only one store in town, you're stuck paying whatever they want for whatever they want to sell you - and if they don't HAVE what you want, tough cheese. Ever see that Flintstones episode where Fred has to book a birthday party for Pebbles AND a stag party at the Lodge? Remember how the caterer screwed up and sent the clown to the Lodge and the Dancing Girls to the kids? Remember his defense? 'Okay, I goofed... So what? What are you going to DO? I'm the ONLY caterer in TOWN...?' Do you want men like these in charge of what YOU can get...? Me neither.

So, some companies started 'Alternative AOLs'... Prodigy, our old friend Compuserve, and a host of others... AOL, by then pretty comfy in the top spot, patently ignored them - but started a campaign of advertising and 'partnerships' to basically make AOL the first name people thought of when they thought 'online'... It worked. Five years, and 21.5 MILLION users in America alone later, and the other guys started to wonder how they were going to make it... AOL refuses to let them at these millions pretty much because AOL needs them to make money, and god forbid any of them find out there's someone out there doing it better... I'm not saying AOL should release their stranglehold on the internet any moreso than I think Bill Gates should have been forced to release his stranglehold on the OS Market... Success shouldn't be punished... It's success without accountability that enters into the murky water... If your stuff is the best, fine... I'll buy it. But if it isn't, get the fuck out of the way so I can find what IS...

That's what I'm getting at, folks... There needs to be a standard. I'm not saying it's AOL, but it needs to be SOMETHING... Look to the telephone... Talking over the phone is pretty much a standard affair, technologically speaking, right? So, when you buy a phone, you don't have to worry about whether you'll be able to talk to whomever you wish, since the chatting on the phone is a standard process, right? You don't have to worry that your phone isn't 'compatible' with the other phones, so the buying process is - simply put - who makes the better phone... That's the way it SHOULD BE.

Now, I look around and everyone's pretty much scrambling about this big merger between AOL and Time/Warner... Personally, I'm all for it. An ISP for stupid people teamed up with an Entertainment Empire for stupid people. Heh. Luckily, the FTC allowed them to merge on the CONDITION that they share their Chat format with the competition... iCast and TribalVoice may have died, but it wasn't in vain, and I'm all atwitter with anticipation as to who will make the best phone for me to chat online with... Then I can maybe get out from under all these damn different chat programs.

But until that day, when all are one...

You're welcome... See you SOON.